"The Voice" by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy in 1914 (Photo by E.O. Hoppe)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,But, as at first, when our day was fair.Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,Standing as when I drew near to the townWhere you would wait from me: yes, as I knew you then,Even to the original air-blue gown!Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessnessTraveling across the wet mead to me here,You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,Heard no more again far or near?Thus I: faltering forward,Leaves around me falling,Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,And the woman calling.December 1912A writer in a Spanish newspaper once quipped that Thomas Hardy had the amazing good fortune to be "one of the finest novelists of the 19th century, and one of the finest poets of the 20th." It's true: Hardy gave up writing fiction after 1895, partly because of the hostility he faced after publishing Jude the Obscure. Hardy had been writing poetry since his teenaged years, and he released Wessex Poems, his first collection, in 1898, at the age of 58.Over the next 30 years, Hardy published more than a thousand poems. They are among the best English verse ever written and are especially loved by other poets. Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin are among the diverse group of writers who championed--and learned from--Hardy's mastery of English verse."The Voice," written after the death of Hardy's wife Emma in 1912, is a prime example of Hardy's ability to take up the English poetic tradition and put it to his own passionate, personal use.It is musical and intricately patterned, but all is at the service of the speaker's profound disquiet--as we might expect from the man who described poetry as "emotion put into measure".Composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten have found Hardy's verse appealing, too. Some of the best settings are by British composer Gerald Finzi; I've included a recording of one of his songs below.

I review British poetry for The Manhattan Review and write about music for The Elgar Society Journal. I also serve as one of the trustees for the Elgar Complete Edition, which is publishing a uniform edition of the composer's scores. My photographs have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have produced more than a dozen videos for The New York Times and McGraw-Hill.

I have contributed to textbooks published by Prentice-Hall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Oxford University Press.

My website is named after the world's first journal devoted entirely to literature and philosophy, launched by Friedrich Schiller in Tuebingen, Germany in 1795. Die Horen is the German name for the Horae, the Greek goddesses of the seasons.